A blog about tabletop hobby and or strategy games, with a side order of electronic turn based goodness here and there. Now with tons of retro gaming content both electronic and tabletop. Also with 20% more self loathing douchebaggery!

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Retro Computing: Why Bother? Amiga 1200 Booklet Special!

On this snowy day keeping me from work I have little to do but goof off as my wont.

But instead of being a slacker, I shall do the Internet a favor and scan and comment on a pack in booklet I somehow still had from a 1992 Amiga magazine from the UK. (A place that actually cared about the best computer for price AND performance of the mid 80s to early 90s.)

So here it is with commentary. Hopefully this booklet being so old I am not breaking any actual copyright laws. Its a 22 year old supplement to an Amiga magazine. Somehow I doubt it. I also do not know if anyone else has scanned this booklet but.. I think it has merit to archive.

(As usual click for bigger.)

The 1200 would have been the ultimate home computer. If it came out in 1990. In 92 it was really too late. 486 PCs with VGA/SVGA basically owned the market at this time. Commodore's nearly nonexistent marketing outside of Europe didn't help matters either.

400 Pounds in 1992 was what? 600 or so US dollars? Damn that is about what my Amiga 500 cost like that less than six months from when this was printed! Course in the US we didn't even know about the 1200! And I was a computer geek and didn't know about it. The regular public? HAHA. No.

For funsies I did a little research. 400 Pounds in November 1992 was 610 .72 in US Dollars. (The Pound to Dollar conversion was VERY low that month. It was usually closer to 1.8 Dollars to the Pound but was 1.5 or so in November. So 5 months earlier if this machine had somehow been imported to the US it would have cost you about 750 US and be worth closer to 1300 in today's money.) If we adjust for inflation, 1014.05 Dollars. Ouchie! (For comparison in a year or so my VERY bare bones Tandy 486 PC would cost 1500 dollars at the time, and not have joystick or sound interfaces. But would come with a 2400 baud modem, 2 button mouse, monitor, a couple games and programs, plus 2 megabytes of RAM.)

Basically AGA chipset gave Amigas SVGA level graphics if you had a really good monitor. If you hooked it up to a TV set not so much. And from the 68000 CPU to a 680020 with options to put in math co processors almost nobody ever did. Especially home users. Businesses might really need more number crunch power. Joe Homebody does NOT.

2 Megabytes standard was pretty solid in 1992. PCMCIA is great for modern users as it allows for flash drives and the like. Low density 3.5 is basically a damned JOKE in November 92 though. Laughing at the Hard Disk prices though it does own for modern users.

IDE hard disks? Again, fantastic for us modern folks.

If you had an HD Workbench 3 looks like it would demolish the Windows 3.1 standard of the day.

Argh. Scan got borked. Unless there is demand it is viewable enough here for what it is.

Yay basic files management info? This might help someone out there I suppose...

Let us continue to laugh at the HDisk prices. LAUGH I TELL YOU.

GVP made lots of bits and bobs to make Amigas better. The 1200 and 600 were finally home user machines where it wasn't completely ridiculous to crack open the case and do it. (600 basically being a smaller Amiga 500 without the numeric keypad and that whole PCMCIA and IDE business capable. And a built in RF modulator. Something the 500 was not.)

I think I have the PC Ishar trilogy thanks to Dotemu and some great sales.

Again, Civ 1 but prettier isn't much to care about nowadays. Civ 2 is the only Civ one needs. Deluxe Paint 4 sounds nice but nowadays we have stuff like Photoshop x.x and GIMP and the like. But I suppose if you want to draw in the age of KLAX it might be a thing.

More programs free software today like Libre Office outdo on modern PCs.

I had a DOS Vista Pro program. Its kind of neat but more of a visual toy. I should see if they have more modern ones and how much..

More programs nobody nowadays really needs most likely. But I am showing it all for historical importance and retrospectiveness.

Leander, Myth, Monkey Island 2, Parasol Stars, Pinball Fantasies, Populous 2, Prince of Persia, R Type, Rainbow Islands, Railroad Tycoon, Road Blasters, Sensible Soccer, Shadow of the Beast 3, Windwalker, Wing Commander, Turrican? Some solid games that work on this machine. (Some I love on other platforms so they may or may not be as good here. Other games I may want to have played but have not yet.)

Jaguar XJ220 was pretty rad in the day. And Lemmings is always good fun. But what have we lost? Airborne Ranger, Bubble Bobble, California Games, Chase HQ, Double Dragon 2, Heimdall, Hero Quest, Last Ninja 2, Lotus 1-2, New Zealand Story, Ninja Warriors, Outrun Europa, Populous, SCI, Shinobi, Space Crusade, Street Fighter 2, Strider. (Again some may own ass on other platforms but suck on the Amigas anyhow.) A pretty sad state IMHO.

Super Off Road? Super Space Invaders? Zak McCraken? SAY IT AINT SO. I am not sure most of those AGA releases ever came out...

The future was: Commodore was effectively out of business within 2 years of this publication. So anyone buying this machine a year after release (November 1993 basically had a machine about to die that couldn't even run all of the older software.) effectively bought a dead machine without a future.

Let's not grieve over Commodore. Much like the contestants in Slaughterama they chose their path in life. And death.

The UK and Europe could not save the Amiga alone. The USA mattered. And the USA chose the PC.

So we may grieve for this machine. For the Amiga platform. What might have been. What should have been. What deserved to be.